Coronation: The ‘Cinderella story’ of Shirley J Thompson

As part of the preparations for his Coronation in May, the King personally handpicked 12 composers to write music for the historic service.

Among them was London-born Shirley J Thompson who had been photographed handing CDs to the then-Prince of Wales at a reception in Clarence House in March last year.

“I think that’s why I clinched the deal!” she laughs.

Yet writing for royalty is nothing new for the composer. Indeed the albums she had handed over were of a composition she had written for his mother 20 years before.

“Anywhere I go, if I see someone who might be interested in my music I’ve always got a CD to give them,” she explains.

“We were chatting and he said to me, ‘well I hope to hear your music one day’, because I was reminding him that I had written music for the Queen, and I said ‘well funny you should say that Prince Charles’, as he was at the time, and I went into my bag, took out a CD and he was so astonished.”

The piece was called New Nation Rising, A 21st Century Symphony and had been commissioned for the Golden Jubilee in 2002.

Telling the story of 1,000 years of London’s history from a time when the city was predominately green fields, it became the basis for the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony (“you’ll not get that from Danny Boyle because it wasn’t his idea!” the composer notes drolly) and marked Thompson as the first woman in Europe to have composed and conducted a symphony in 40 years.

Not a bad achievement for someone who at the age of 11 found her hopes in tatters as she faced discrimination at school.

Thompson’s parents had both moved to East Ham in east London from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation in the late 1940s, her father becoming a forklift driver and her mother a district nurse.

Born in January 1958, she was the eldest of five siblings and developed a love of music from the age of three, when she would creep off into her neighbour’s house where an old piano was stored in the attic.

“I don’t know how I escaped my mum… I used to sneak up there and just bang away at the piano,” she says.

“Nobody ever said anything, but I would bang away and the sounds were just magical. I would just touch this thing and a sound would come so I was absolutely entranced.”

Thompson excelled at school but as she approached the end of her primary education she says her grades suddenly took an inexplicable downturn despite the standard of her work not changing.

“That [discrimination] was just so blatant because all my friends were sent to the grammar school and I was sent to the secondary modern school,” she says.

“My mother went down to the director of education – I had no idea she was doing all that because by that time I had settled in my lot of probably ending up in a factory somewhere.”

Her mother’s efforts led to her being moved to the grammar school the following year, something Thompson believes was “pivotal” in her ending up at the University of Liverpool where she studied music and history – her favourite subjects.

The topics remain key to her work with Thompson particularly focusing on historical markers throughout society, such as the Windrush generation, climate change and the death of George Floyd, when she decides what to write about.

“I can’t help myself, I’m driven, as a historian, to mark particular watershed moments in life, so for me as an artist I just can’t let these watershed moments go. I kind of mark these moments for myself and if others are interested that’s great,” she says.

For Thompson, it is both the historic nature of the Coronation and the religious basis of the service that have inspired her writing for the King.

Her piece forms the finale of a three-part composition based on one of his favourite hymns, Be Thou my Vision. According to Buckingham Palace, it will start with a “sparkling fanfare” before progressing to a “triumphant and celebratory ending”.

Unable to reveal much more, Thompson only says it’ll be a “really big” orchestral composition to be performed by the specially formed Coronation Orchestra.

“It was incredible, I had absolutely no inkling when I got the phone call that the King personally chose me along with some other people to write something for the Coronation,” she says.

And yet she adds possibly of greater excitement is that she has been invited to be among the congregation so will be able to hear the performance live.

“I’m thrilled to bits… I fell off my chair when I saw that invitation come in,” she says.

“Who would have dreamt all that from my transition from my school as an 11-year-old with all that – it was an awful time – and then, you know, writing for the King.

“You couldn’t write it could you? That’s a real Cinderella story.”